> One of my coworkers made a completely static portfolio website with a single page and used react.

People love hating on react, but I mean this is pretty common. Raw is fine, but even in a "static" thing, you'll eventually go "ok now I want to reuse some text here.." Or have some common elements with x things shared. So I'm gonna have to write some hacky imperative JS? Or messy CSS? And what starts as static very easily becomes slightly dynamic. I hate overengineering, so if React were hard to setup or deploy I'd agree (eg Kube), but the cost-benefit of React makes it worth it in most cases for me